Star-Struck

When Julie Klam conceived of her new book, “The Stars in Our Eyes: The Famous, the Infamous, and Why We Care Way Too Much About Them,” Donald J. Trump had yet to become celebrity in chief.

“I did have to go back and make some changes after he won, because what I wrote about as political scandals were like frolics in the park compared to what’s happening now,” Klam told me. “A lot of people can say, ‘I’m not interested in celebrities.’ Well, you have a reality show star as president. I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to figure out how and why we got here.”

But the humorous Klam keeps things mostly lighthearted — and far-ranging. “My definition of ‘celebrity’ always has stretched pretty wide,” she writes in the book. “The guy who played piano at the restaurant where our family used to have dinner when I was a kid? I got his autograph.”

Threaded throughout are other people’s anecdotes about memorable encounters with famous faces. One of Klam’s respondents literally ran into Kevin Bacon, sending papers that the actor was holding flying through the air. Another, while working at Barnes & Noble, “helped a wonderfully foulmouthed Melanie Griffith shop for yoga DVDs.”

Klam was surprised by the enthusiasm with which people shared their stories, and the granular level of their recall.

“I’m not sure there are many things in our lives that hit us like that,” she said. “I myself cannot remember entire years of my life, but I can tell you in sharp detail the story, from 1986, of waiting to get into the bathroom at my dermatologist when Mary Tyler Moore came out and said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve used the last of the toilet paper.’”

Quotable

“I don’t take pointers from people on poetry, but I do when it comes to fiction. For poetry, I’m happy for people not to get it the first time. I don’t think there’s any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.” — Nick Laird, author of “Modern Gods,” in Interview Magazine

The Science of Misusing Science

“The Cherry-Pick,” “The Oversimplification,” “The Literal Nitpick.” These are just a few of the categories Dave Levitan sets forth in “Not a Scientist,” his book about the “variety of subtle, nuanced and sometimes downright malevolent ways to manipulate science toward political ends.” His broad survey includes the way that leaders such as Chris Christie and Rick Perry have sought the glory for happy environmental statistics, which are especially prone to the maneuver Levitan calls “The Credit Snatch.” “Reducing pollution is a catchy and universally popular idea,” he writes, “even if your audience isn’t entirely sure what the pollution in question is, and the reasons for those reductions are often nebulous enough that anyone could take credit. ‘I was there when it happened!’ is good enough for many a politician.”